NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 (Kepler GK104 GPU) Officially Launched

GeForce GTX 680 Overview

Here we are, NVIDIA has officialy launched the GeForce GTX 680 based on the Kepler GK104 GPU. This card packs a bunch of new features (and some of them can be tweaked with some line of code!) such as GPU Boost (dynamic clocking depending on GPU load), adaptive VSYNC, bindless textures, new power management functions (Power Target), TXAA (temporal anti-aliasing), NVENC (encoding engine) and optimized power consumption. The architecture has been changed (no double speed anymore for shader processors, this is the new SMX unit) and priced at USD $499, this card targets AMD Radeon HD 7900 series.

As I suspected… new arch is great for gaming but is also step back in GPGPU. Well, maybe not whole big step, but a little one. Nevertheless it’s step in the right direction. Lower temps and energy consumptions, great performance and visual quality. That’s what made NV famous.

I don’t think that it is step back in computing. I would like to see some CUDA benchmarks to verify that. NVIDIA invested to much in CUDA and it’s ecosystem to make a step back now. I think that low performance in OpenCL benchmarks is becaus earyl drivers.